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OPINION

Nunes’ departure a small step in the direction of credibility

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif, walks out the White House in Washington, Wednesday, March 22, 2017, to speak with reporters after a meeting with President Donald Trump.(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

It’s still not a sure thing that the House Intelligence Committee will conduct a credible bipartisan investigation of whether Russia interfered in last year’s presidential campaign with the intention of helping Donald Trump and whether any members of the Trump campaign colluded in that effort.

But Thursday’s announcement by the committee’s chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., that he is stepping down from the investigation removes a compromising cloud from the inquiry. Nunes said he was withdrawing temporarily while the House Ethics Committee probed a complaint by outside groups — a complaint he called “false and politically motivated” — that he had improperly disclosed classified information.

The complaint apparently refers to Nunes’ statements last month that U.S. surveillance operations aimed at foreign targets had incidentally collected communications involving members of President-elect Trump’s transition team, and that some of the U.S. citizens had been identified or “unmasked.” He also claimed that details about people associated with the incoming administration “with little apparent foreign intelligence value” were widely disseminated in intelligence community reporting.

To put it mildly, Nunes undermined his credibility as an impartial investigator with his freelancing. The New York Times reported that Nunes had obtained his information from the same place he delivered it — the White House, specifically from two officials. (Nunes has refused to identify his sources.)

Given his compromised credibility, Nunes should make his recusal permanent. But even without him in the picture, the narrative he was pressing — that the Obama administration improperly handled intelligence reports mentioning Trump associates — has become a rallying cry for conservatives and for the president himself.

The conspiracy theorizing went into overdrive when it was reported that Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor, had sought to identify some U.S. persons with connections to the Trump campaign who were mentioned or quoted in foreign intelligence reports, as she had a right to do if the information were relevant to her duties. Rice said it was “absolutely false” that she had done so improperly or that she had leaked intelligence information. With characteristic recklessness, Trump said Rice may have committed a crime.

If evidence emerges that the procedures designed to protect Americans’ privacy were overridden for political purposes during the transition between the Obama and Trump administrations, that obviously justifies an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee and its counterpart in the Senate, which is also investigating Russian interference in last year’s election.

So far, however, “unmasking” seems to be a sideshow. If the intelligence committees want to retain their credibility with the public, they’ll remember that.